[CW] teaching cw

[Michael Josefsson]

Hi Bruce. I have not the answer to your specific question but some 
observations  I have made during the years might be of interest anyway?

I use the Koch-method of teaching morse with the excellent software 
made available by G4FON. He follows the traditional Koch-method with 
"KMRS...". I strongly suspect tha KM is "Koch Metode" due to the German 
heritage:)

On my course we run thas at 15 WPM from start. It is fast for the 
unexperienced but teaching anything slower I think is an insult to the 
students as not much morse is conducted at much lower speeds and I want 
to avoid using the brain when training the characters, only reflexes. 
All this adheres to the Koch philosophy of teaching morse.

I have hovewer found that older people (50-60+) have difficulty coping 
with that speed. So in their case I go slower. They had problems 
*writing* the characters down in 15 WPM pace. They had no problems 
understanding which character it was.

I have found that the single biggest obstacle is to lag the writing by 
one (or preferably more) character. I use much of the first lessons to 
get them to write the letter down exactly the moment they hear the 
beginning *next* character. Without that device the rest of the course 
is much more difficult.

As for the order. The traditional Swedish course starts off with 
"NLEOIXTV...". I don't know if that sequence is widely used elsewhere?

73's
/Micke (SM5JAB)

On torsdag, jan 13, 2005, at 01:17 Europe/Stockholm, Bruce Shaw wrote:

> I will be teaching a CW class in Feb to about 8 who have passed their 
> general class theory and are now working on their cw.  Someone posted 
> a suggested order for teaching the characters a while back and I 
> thought I saved it but..................does anyone still have that 
> list?  I have the general idea of what it was but seeing it again 
> would help.  Thanks in advance.
>
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> Bruce Shaw
> Snow Camp NC
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